Biography:

Wan-Zi Lu is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology. She has completed a set of studies on how traditional authority structures shape democratization and financialization across indigenous peoples in Taiwan. Her current research traces the development of regulatory frameworks for organ donation in a number of East Asian polities to understand why shared cultural norms produced different policies of and practices in moralized markets. She has co-authored a chapter in The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge) and published in Contexts.

Dissertation: Morals, Markets, and Mobilization of Organ Donation 

When confronted by the ethical dilemma between cultivating altruism for transplants and following customs and beliefs that take the body parts as family possessions, how do policymakers, medical professionals, and donors’ families negotiate the moral boundaries? Through comparing the development of organ donation in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where the Confucianist thought regards preserving body integrity as enacting filial piety, my dissertation addresses this question. I argue that the historical trajectories shaping the stakeholders and their political coordination explain why the similar moral barriers for transplants in these sites generate different regulations. But governments can only claim relative autonomy. The practices of organ donation portray that when mobilizing altruistic acts, organizational arrangements shape the possibilities for situational adaptation and generate unexpected donation outcomes: Singapore shows a decline in donation rates with the country’s most incentivized donor pool whilst Taiwan’s organ supplies grow given its most stringent regulation on organ donation worldwide. In addition to examining the subregional variations, my dissertation traces how countries around the world debated, passed, and amended regulations related to organ donation and gamete exchange. I identify factors shaping the legislative processes to explain why the same country adopts contrasting approaches to regulating the giving of the same set of body parts.